And then I heard her voice, as clean and pure as a bell. The tears of the moon’s daughter are as powerful as the tides. I felt her strength within me, my moon-mother. I had always had it—the strength of the night, the strength of the tides, the strength to reflect the light of others. The strength to weep without weakness.
“You’re not going to kill them.”
I rose from the ground, my arms outstretched. I was my father’s child. I was my mother’s daughter. My face was still wet, and my heart beat in rhythm with the music of the oceans.
“And you’re not going to kill me.”
The jagged green light shot at me, but I met it with a searing white light of my own. Where they clashed, the green glowing softened, became liquid, and fell to the floor like rain.
“No!” the Serpent King cried, his eyes burning orbs. “How is this possible?”
“I guess there’s no getting around it. I am your daughter, at least biologically,” I said. “I can’t hide from who I am. But it doesn’t mean I can’t choose my own destiny.”
He shot bolt after bolt of green fire, but I met them all with the shimmering, diamond light of my own. The intensity of its power grew each time I aimed my hands.
When unleashed, there is no more powerful force than the will of nature.
I was a part of nature, a moon-child, and I wanted desperately to live, to have my loved ones live. Not die in this horrible dark cavern, but walk together into the light.
My body felt possessed, as if I was channeling all my moon-mother’s energy through me. My eyes were wet and felt like they were glowing white-hot. My hair shot out around me—shimmering as if with electricity. And the moonlight—not soft, but terrible, and beautiful too—shot like dancing fire from my upturned palms.
There was a rumbling, and I knew that I was somehow shifting the tides in the sea above our heads. I heard a familiar groaning.
“Where din-din go? Snaky King, you steal Bogli’s din-din?”
The cavern started to shake, and streams of water poured down from cracks in the ceiling. Then I heard a drumbeat that could only be the rhythmic sound of demonic footsteps.
The rakkhosh baby, Bogli. Somehow, the Serpent King had recruited him to get us to this cavern. And now Bogli was coming to collect his reward. The thought of facing both the Serpent King and the baby demon should have terrified me. But I wasn’t scared. I knew exactly who I was.
I turned to the seven-headed cobra and said, with both sympathy and hard honesty, “You better run, Brother. All heck’s about to break loose, and our father’s not going to save you.”
The seven forked tongues flickered for only a moment as Naga considered my words. Then the seven heads nodded as the cobra unwound himself from his victims. Ma, Baba, and Tuni fell in a collapsed heap on the ground. All injured, but all breathing.
“Thisss isssn’t the end, Sssissster.” Naga shot his muscular tongues in my direction, but I fended them off with a bolt of white light.
“Oh, I’ll count on it,” I called as the cobra slithered down a passage and disappeared.
“Good riddance to old rubbish,” the Serpent King snarled, aiming his claws at me. “Now to take out the rest of the trash!”
I was tired, but exhilarated. I aimed my hands, willing the white light with all my might, but before I could, something happened. From the streams of water pouring out of the cracking ceiling, a woman in misty white appeared. She was translucent, as if she existed only as a reflection in the water.
“Mother,” I breathed.
“I have let this go on for long enough!” Her voice boomed through the cavern with an unearthly force. “I let my love for you blind me to your darkness, but no more!”
“You are my wife,” the Serpent King snarled. “You are bound to my darkness. You don’t have strength to kill me!”
But this was the moon’s most fierce face. Her light glowed a thousand times brighter than mine. It was glorious and terrifying at the same time. Confronted with such power, the Serpent King went from scoffing to disbelieving to actually a little worried.
Even still, he raised his hands, sneering at her. “You don’t have the guts!”
As he launched the crackling lightning from his hands, the moon shot a white-hot beam at the Serpent King. He glowed an incandescent green, but then began to writhe and decay, his energy going from green to brown to gray to black.
As his power dissipated, so did the swirling orb holding Neel. Neel was free—panting, eyes closed, on the ground. But free.
When I turned back around, the Serpent King was a pile of char. She had done it. The moon maiden had freed me, and herself.
I could barely look at her; her aspect was so awesome and powerful. I ducked my head in a grateful bow.
“He is gone for now, but not forever,” she said, her voice shimmery like the ocean.
“Thank you, Mother,” I whispered.
For a moment, she touched my head with a silvery hand. I felt the cool liquid of her touch fill me with energy, power, and love. She slipped something strong and yet pliable in my hands—my bow, magically intact.
“You are the daughter of the moon. But you are also the daughter of those good people who raised you. And yes, you are the daughter of the dark Serpent King too.” Her voice rang like a bell in the echoing cavern. “Everything is connected to everything, Kiranmala.”
I nodded. My eyes were too full of tears to do anything else. It was only when I admitted to myself all of who I was that I was able to find my deepest power.
Then my moon-mother withdrew, becoming faint and distant again.
Her last words to me were ones of warning. “And now, you must run, my daughter, for the demons are coming.”
The ceiling was collapsing, and the underground cavern was filling with seawater. The thumping footsteps of the baby demon were fast upon us, and everyone was half unconscious from the attack of my serpent relatives. Just another average day in the alternate dimension.
“Neel, get up!” I didn’t have time to be super sympathetic right now. He was a demon prince and a fast healer, and I needed his help with the others. I hauled him up by the armpits and yelled into his half-focused face. “Come on, daycare demon’s on his way, and we’ve got to get out of here!”
I was thinking about slapping him across the face, but he got it together about the third time I shook him. The water in the cavern was already waist-high.
“Let’s get the others in the boat.”
Neel and I half dragged, half carried Ma, Baba, and Tuntuni into the peacock barge. The golden and silver spheres rolled around as if glad to see us. My parents were holding up okay, but the small bird had really gotten the worst of it. He sputtered and coughed, his face and body badly bruised.
Ma wrapped the bird in the frayed end of her sari, but her troubled eyes were on me. “Are you all right, my golden one?”
I couldn’t say anything. Fat tears fell out of my eyes. Now that I’d turned on the faucet, I couldn’t seem to shut it off.
Ma and Baba were horrified at the sight of me crying. “Are you hurt? Oh, what can we do? Is it your bowels?” They looked as if they thought I was going to die.